Things Just Got Better

CADSoft Consulting is now ATG USA

You may have heard about our recent acquisition by ATG USA. Together as one company, we can leverage each other's strengths and move further toward our commitment of providing the best technical support, customer service, and design solutions available to customers in the United States

Our customer relationships, based on value and success, are positioned to benefit greatly from this move. As a result of our newly formed company, you will now have access to an expanded portfolio of services and training to meet all of your AEC needs. You will continue to work with the same people in our Arizona, New Mexico and Texas offices that you have in the past, with new opportunities for quicker response times through a larger combined staff.

It's time to tell our story. Together.
Click to continue to ATGUSA.COM

Wanting to save a view as an image for reports? There are a few easy steps totaking higher-quality image shots within Revit as a Render image. It will store the image in the Revit Project Browser, after which the image view in Revit is exported to a standalone file for creating reports.

Let’s get into the details.

Select a View

When I usea 3D view with a section box, I want to zoom to a portion of the model to illustrate a point in my report to the project’s stakeholders. From the image below, after I have spun the oriented the view as needed, I am ready to save the view as an image.

Save the Project as a Image

Do a right click on the view name in the project browser and right click on the name to open the context-based tools. Select “Save to Project as Image.”

This will then bring up a setting dialog box.

Just follow the setup per the image above, giving consideration on how “Save Image to Project” would need to be optimized for your report.

After the image is saved, look in the Project Browser for the saved image under the Rendering Category. Custom browser organization might not display the Renders category.

Before beginning to export the freshly created view(s), save the project in a way that makes it visible in the list of views to export. Go to the Revit Start Icon in the upper left corner of the Revit session. Keep in mind that there are many export options, and it’s necessary to scroll down near the bottom to find the “Export as Image” option.

It’s worth nothing that the “Export Image” dialog box does offer a way to directly export the current view, as opposed to the steps we went through to create the Render views beforehand. The process shown above, however, lets us set up several views to save to the Renders category and be exported in one step.

After exporting, browse to the folder the Project is in, and find the files that were created in the Export procedure.

The quality might be a little better than a screen grab.

I have to share this little gem.

We all know when placing a family component to the model that the spacebar option rotates the family along a 90-degree segment, right?

Well, try this option: When the non-hosted family must be rotated in respect to a previously placed line or reference plane of some unknown angle in the model, place the family and then rotate it.

Next, begin to place the component family and then hover the family over the angled reference (or arc), highlighting the reference (line, wall, etc). Click on the spacebar; the preview placements will flip between perpendicular or parallel to the reference object.

Autodesk Live

If you need to share something more than static images with the project team and stakeholders, consider using
Autodesk Live
, which is a cloud-based solution for uploading Revit models and rendering them in minutes without tying up system resources.

It’s an easy workflow with an add-in application loaded to the Add-ins tab in Revit. Using an Editor tool, tweak lighting and shadows to best reflect lighting conditions specific to the time of the year with graphics settings.